2019’s Jumanji: The Next Level is the sequel to 2017’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, which is, in itself, both a reboot and sequel of sorts to the original Jumanji. It may help to have seen the previous Jumanji movies to enjoy the 2019 offering, but it’s not really necessary. The Jumanji movies know who their target audience is and they are unashamedly easy viewing from the off.

And it’s hard not to enjoy a movie that is so intent on entertaining you. I’m certain there are gaping plot holes throughout the narrative, but I don’t care. Jumanji: The Next Level achieves the perfect balance of retaining everything that was great about Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle without being a total rehash of that movie. It even manages to pay an homage the 1995 original at the end too. I don’t think it would reasonable to ask anything more of a movie that is, on paper, a sequel to a reboot.

Score for Christmasishness

All three Jumanji movies are a bit Christmas(ish) but Jumanji: The Next Level is the most Christmas(ish) of the three because Christmas is actually a plot device. The four main characters from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle are reunited because they are home for the holidays. It’s never Christmas within the demonic titular game, but in the ‘real world’ scenes it is very much Christmas throughout the movie and explicitly so.

It’s Christmas Eve again, and therefore time once more to bring an end to my annual Christmas Countdown of films that are a bit Christmas(ish). You’d imagine that after six years of this pointless lunacy that I would finally have fun out of movies but, alas, I already have another 24 lined up for next year. None quite as good as today’s entry though, which is arguably one of the greatest movies of all time.

Indeed it’s so great that, even though it is a sequel to another great movie, it is often purported to be better than it’s precursor.

I don’t know if I agree with that assessment, because I did really like the first movie, which was my Christmas Eve movie of choice last year.

That film was Francis Ford Copolla’s 1972 masterpiece, The Godfather, which of course means that this year’s Christmas Eve entry is Francis Ford Copolla’s 1974 masterpiece, The Godfather Part II.

I’m not sure it’s especially fair to compare the two films anyway, because they are clearly best viewed as two parts of the same peerless masterpiece. But if you do view the films that way then maybe you have to consider The Godfather Part III as part of the whole, and The Godfather III is nowhere near as good as the first two.

On balance I think I have a slight preference for the original movie, but The Godfather Part II is an astonishing sequel/prequel and deserving of the many plaudits it has received over the years.

Score for Christmasishness

On first viewing I didn’t think that The Godfather Part II was as Christmas(ish) as its predecessor, but on repeat viewings I can see it scores pretty highly on the Christmas(ish) scale. There is only one really obvious nod to Christmas, which is when we see a fully decorated Christmas tree in the home of one of the main characters, but the timeline of the movie (or one of the timelines, as there is a dual narrative covering two different time periods) covers a lot of ground after we see that Christmas tree until the action focuses on a New Years Eve party in Cuba. So everything that happens in that time (which is a significant portion of the running time) must happen in and around Christmas. After that there are references to a Christmas present, and quite a bit of snow on the ground. A Christmas tree is also referenced (if not explicitly seen) in one of the final scenes in the movie – a flashback to the Corleone family gathering to celebrate a birthday which happens to be in December.

I’m wearing a onesie festooned with images of Christmas trees and reindeer. I’m a tad more inebriated than would be the norm mid-afternoon. The oven is full of delicious (and expensive) things roasting and coated in an elaborate range of herbs and condiments. And we’re halfway through our second tub of chocolates in as many days.

All the evidence would suggest that it is Christmas.

And compared to Christmases of recent years, it is a pretty good one. Although the bar was set pretty low in 2020 and 2021 thanks to a certain pandemic so I wouldn’t want to overstate how good this Christmas is.

The fact that we are allowed to see other people this year, hasn’t necessarily encouraged my family unit to alter our usual plans of staying at home and quietly overindulging. But we are planning on seeing other people on other days over the festive break which is an option that was not available in recent Christmases past.

This year our family unit is a little larger thanks to the arrival of my youngest child, who has taken on the moniker of Littler Proclaims for the purposes of this blog.

Littler Proclaims is enjoying her first Christmas insofar as an eight-month-old ever could. She generally seems to be a happy child anyway, so I’m not sure whether Christmas has factored into her mood. Unlike her older sister – Little Proclaims – who this morning declared herself to be a ‘Christmas expert’ and who is intent on educating her younger sibling to all the ways of the season.

Little Proclaims’ current thesis on the subject is that Christmas is mainly about opening presents and eating chocolate. And she truly is an expert at both of those things.

But I’m not too shabby at those things either, so I like to think she learned from the best. Plus I’m also really good at drinking too much alcohol, a skill I’ve yet to pass on to my offspring, because I’m led to believe that might constitute bad parenting.

Anyway, wherever you are and whatever you are doing, I hope this Christmas finds you well. And a little fatter than you were yesterday.

As I write this I’m still enjoying a Christmas Day which has predominantly seen me sitting around in a festive onesie, drinking too much beer and eating too much festive food. But lest you accuse me of slothfulness, rest assured that I did cook the vast majority of the festive food, which was not without some effort on my part. And some of it was quite healthy. Or would have been if I hadn’t eaten it to excess. The beer is harder to justify from a health perspective but it is only Christmas once a year so I’m sure that’s justification enough for having a few too many. It’s the beer I drink every other day of the year that is probably of greater concern.

I did start the day by leaving the house and running (albeit very slowly) ten whole kilometres so I can justify any excesses I like today. Putting on a festive onesie upon my return home has no real justification beyond the fact that it’s pretty comfortable. And it amuses my elder daughter, which is frankly priceless.

I’m currently sat at my dining table, opposite said elder daughter, who is playing quietly with one of her Christmas presents. This is also priceless (the playing quietly, not the Christmas present which definitely did have a recommended retail price). We were, until mere moments ago, accompanied by my younger daughter, who was also playing with a Christmas present, a plastic monkey from an equally plastic train set, which she was banging on her high chair with unabashed glee. Then all of a sudden she started crying, as eight-month-old children are prone to do and Mrs Proclaims took her away to provide a solution that I am biologically ill-equipped to offer.

I’m not sure why I’m writing this post beyond the fact that it is rare that I find myself with time on my hands. As tomorrow I’m expecting to be driving to Wales to see my family, I can’t imagine I’ll have time to write a Boxing Day post. It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t write a Boxing Day post, but it’s nice to have the option available to me, as I reach the end of a year in which I have rarely had the luxury of disposable time.

The main reasons for that lack of disposable time (and indeed my lack of any disposable cash) have been my two daughters. But, as daughter number two has just re-joined my little dining table gathering, complete with an additional plastic toy to bang on her high chair, and daughter number one continues to play with her unicorn themed Polly Pocket playset while loudly singing about this being “the best Christmas ever”, I can’t help but feel that disposable time may be a tad overrated.

It is New Year’s Eve and as such I am bound by the international blogging code of ethics to review the year that is about to end. The year in question is 2022, which, not being a leap year, was made up of 365 days. Some of those days were quite interesting. Some were not very interesting. I expect most fell somewhere in between those two states.

2022 was a bit different to its immediate predecessors insofar as it wasn’t mostly dominated by a pandemic. Covid 19 was still a thing, and back in January still seemed like it might even be quite a big thing, but mainly it has carried on in the background of 2022 while the world at large has moved on to being concerned about other things.

Indeed the main impact of Covid 19 on the state of public health in the UK is that, after two years of largely avoiding people, we’ve rediscovered that there are a whole host of other ailments that we can catch off each other that can also make us quite ill. This December the Proclaims family have enjoyed a range of respiratory viruses, none of which were Covid 19, but all of which have contributed to a lot of coughing, sneezing and general self-pity.

But other stuff has happened in 2022. So much stuff, in fact, that it would be superficial to imagine I could cover it all in one facile blog post.

But my posts are nothing if not perfunctory so I shall attempt to sum up 2022 in an overly simplistic manner that offers little to no insight into the actual events I’m describing.

The main thing that 2022 will be remembered for is probably war. Which is not a great thing to be remembered for and makes the pandemic-blighted 2020 and 2021 seem almost heart-warming by comparison. War is always horrific but it is rare that there is such a broad consensus on which side is in the wrong. However, as ill-informed as I generally am about world events, I’m going to get off the fence on this one and state that Russia are definitely the bad guys.

Indeed so in agreement is the world that Ukraine are the innocent party in the conflict that Ukraine won the Eurovision song contest this year. Which really must have stuck it to Putin and his cronies.

Pro-Ukrainian feelings did not stop the Welsh football team from beating Ukraine in the playoffs for the 2022 football World Cup. Being a fan of the Wales football team, I was not at all conflicted about how I felt about this – I was genuinely delighted. And even though Wales would go on to not win a single game at arguably the most controversial World Cup in history, it was quite a big deal for Wales to be there, having not qualified for a World Cup since 1958. Whether the World Cup should have been in Qatar or not (and it obviously shouldn’t have been for all kinds of well-documented and cogent reasons) it would be hard to begrudge Wales fans for being a bit excited about it. And, Welsh failures aside, it was a really good World Cup from a sporting perspective, with arguably the best final ever. And Lionel Messi finally confirmed his status at the greatest of all time (or the GOAT as the cool kids like to say) by being on the winning team. Although Pele did die two days ago, which reminded people that he was also the GOAT. Because you can never have too many GOATs in sport. But Qatar 2022 was terribly controversial. much more so than the preceding World Cup which took place in…erm…Russia. Still it was really good to see that so many vocal commentators were there, in Qatar, to point out the obvious sports washing that was taking place, while simultaneously staying in luxury Qatari accommodation and eulogising the football to the point that the sport effectively washed itself.

Does that last sentence make sense?

Probably not but then not much in 2022 really did.

UK politics, in particular, made less than no sense for most of 2022. It had always been stretching credulity to imagine Boris Johnson could really ever make an adequate prime minister. But somehow he managed to eke out his premiership for just over three years. Not the longest innings, but on a par with a few of his more recent predecessors and far more time than he deserved given the obvious failings of his period in charge. At the time of his demise it was hard to imagine a less competent prime minister. But Liz Truss was keen to step up to the plate and in just fifty days she broke the British economy and achieved the shortest premiership in UK history. Rishi Sunak has as much blood on his hands as any frontbencher from the last few years, but such was the turmoil that Truss left in her wake that even the most ardent critic of the Tories would have to say that Sunak’s relative blandness is almost a breath of fresh air.

The UK economy remains broken though and no amount of insincere soundbites are going to make 2023 anything less than painful for most of us. Particularly those of us that made the dubious decision in 2022 to increase the number of mouths to be fed in our households. But more of that later.

For no retrospective of 2022 could be complete without referencing another family. The British Royal Family to be precise (other Royal Families are available). For while 2022 saw the shortest time in office of any UK prime minister, it was during that premiership that the longest reign of any UK monarch came to an end. Queen Elizabeth II died in the year of her Platinum Jubilee and whatever your feelings are about the concept of a monarchy (and I would largely consider myself to be at the cynical end of that spectrum), most people would acknowledge that she was a figure beloved by the British people and to be so consistently held in such high esteem for her seventy-year reign is testament to the fact that, in all likelihood, she was deserving of that affection. Alas the same can’t quite be said of some of her surviving family. But that’s a topic probably best left to the expertise of Netflix.

On a personal level, 2022 has been a year to remember, mainly through an increase in sleepless nights and dirty nappies. For in April 2022, shortly after celebrating my 43rd birthday (and by ‘celebrating’ I mean ignoring) I was blessed with the arrival of my second child – the adorable Littler Proclaims. Her arrival is the predominant reason I’ve been absent from this blog for much of 2022, but she has been a delightful distraction (the odd poonami aside) for the most part. She’s currently sleeping on me as I write this, which is not exactly an aide to the process (typing one-handed is not a skill I have truly mastered) but is gratifying in almost every other sense. I like her when she is awake too, although she is currently beset by one of the aforementioned respiratory viruses so not at her most cheerful at present. She is in general a pretty happy baby though, full of smiles and babbling nonsense.

She is not as exuberant as her older sibling, which is something of a relief. Regular readers will know that I adore my firstborn but the OG Little Proclaims is nothing short of high maintenance. She dotes on (and occasionally terrorises) her baby sister but the sudden shift from being the entire centre of her parents’ universe to cohabiting that space has been a difficult adjustment for her. Fortunately 2022 has offered her an opportunity to maintain the spotlight as she has formally begun her primary education and has been attending a nearby school full-time since September. I was never particularly school-shaped as a child (which makes my career choice of teaching a little strange) but Little Proclaims is very much enjoying her initial foray into the classroom. She even secured the prestigious role of ‘The Cow’ in her first school nativity recently. We were very proud. And less ironically than we thought we might be. Few children can ever have embraced the role of ‘The Cow’ quite as enthusiastically as Little Proclaims did.

Children aside, 2022 has not been without personal triumphs. I’ve participated in, and completed, no less than five half marathons, which is quite a lot more than I would have been capable of running in 2021 and completely unimaginable in 2020 when I was struggling to get to grips with the couch to 5K training plan. There have been other successes and failures, as there are most years. Mainly 2022 was more positive than negative on that score, which is better than the norm I feel.

In blogging terms though, 2022 was a catastrophic failure.

I might need to do something about that in 2023…

As it’s New Year’s Day I find myself, as I do most years, compiling a list of stuff that I need to start doing in the coming year in order to make myself somewhat less inadequate.

Most years, fully aware that any genuine attempt at self-improvement will inevitably be doomed to failure within a few short hours of me completing said list of goals, I have taken to writing insincere resolutions on these pages, mainly for comic effect.

Last year I hit a particular low in this endeavour, when I wrote a list of resolutions that mainly centered around me watching the movie Space Jam. And the worst thing about that post is that, one year on, I still haven’t seen either the original 1996 iteration, nor have I seen the 2021 sequel – Space Jam: A New Legacy. Weirdly though, I did buy a Space Jam themed basketball top, which I wore quite a lot last summer. I don’t play basketball. I don’t know why I bought the top. It is pretty comfortable in hot weather and bizarrely we had quite a lot of hot weather for a UK summer but I’m still not sure it was an entirely appropriate purchase. I might get around to watching the movies in 2023. But that definitely won’t be my resolution for this year, because whether I wrote that post for comic effect or not, you’d imagine I could have gotten around to watching two relatively short movies in order to offer some kind of conclusion to last year’s efforts.

But I didn’t, so I’m not going down that road this year.

Instead I thought I might buck the trend and set myself some actual goals for this year. Unambitious goals naturally, because the last thing I want to do is set myself up to fail, but goals I might like to achieve nonetheless.

I’m not sure this is going to hit the ‘comedy highs’ of my nonsensical ramblings about Space Jam but I would like to be better at stuff so perhaps it’s time to share those ambitions in blog form in a rare show of sincerity. Here goes nothing:

1. Lose some weight. Any amount of weight. I’ve weighed the same for the last five years in spite of having started doing quite a lot of exercise over the last three years. I can only conclude that I need to make some dietary changes. And maybe drink less beer. This will be hard. I like food and I like beer and I have a lot of both in the house at the moment. But I am overweight by anyone’s definition and that probably isn’t the wisest lifestyle choice as I head towards my mid-forties. I’m not going to put a number on this, but if I weigh a tiny bit less on the 1st January 2024 I think that would probably be a good thing. Obviously I need to do something about all the food and beer that is currently in the house so I think the best thing to do would be to spend January 2023 binging on all of that and then start on the weight loss journey in February. That seems like a pretty foolproof plan right?
2. Write more. Ideally write that novel that I’m always saying I’ll write. But at the very least post more regularly on this blog. I like writing. It make me happy. I like to think that my writing sometimes amuses other people too. But the important thing is it makes me happy and I didn’t do enough of it in 2022.
3. Keep fit. I think I am pretty fit now, in spite of the aforementioned weight-loss difficulties, but I used to be very fit and then I became fairly unfit in my thirties without realising it had happened. I prefer being fit. It’s good to be able to keep up with my lively eldest daughter and she’s only getting livelier as time goes on, so I need to stay at the top of my game. Obviously keeping fit would be easier if I enjoyed exercise. I assumed that after three years of working out regularly that I might have found some level of pleasure in the pain by now. But I haven’t. So really I’m just committing to another year of being miserable. Which seems like a stupid thing to do.
4. Spend less money. As the cost of living goes through the roof, I imagine this will be challenging, but I’m not averse to impulse purchases (the Space Jam basketball top is probably a good indicator of this) and I’d really like to have more money for things like a new kitchen, given that my current kitchen seems to be falling apart. I’m not sure all of my frivolous purchases would necessarily add up to the cost of a new kitchen, but I’ve got to start somewhere. I know a new kitchen is relatively boring, but I would be happy to make a concession on this and go for a Space-Jam themed kitchen if that would in some way help to make it a reality.
5. Enjoy the moment. Not necessarily this particular moment. But some moments. I think I might be one of those people that is so concerned with the future that they forget to enjoy the present. Maybe I’ll just end up finding out that the moment is actually rubbish and therefore impossible to enjoy but it would nice to have a little more certainty about this.

There you go. A list of resolutions with a modicum of sincerity. Does that sincerity mean I’ll achieve any of them?

Or I will I continue to be an overweight man who drinks too much beer while wearing sports tops with abstract cinematic themes?

Only time will tell.

As it is January and thus still very much a time for making unrealistic pledges, I’m still fairly confident that I’m going to turn around my 2022 blogging slump and actually post quite regularly in 2023.

However, my ambitions are tempered with a little reality – gone are the days of posting daily as I managed for an entire year between March 2020 and March 2021. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that that level of blogging commitment was only possible for the following reasons:

1. There was a pandemic – even though I still had to work for quite a lot of that pandemic, I definitely had an increase in disposable time during that unhappy period.
2. The pandemic also meant that I tended to use blogging as a coping strategy because pandemics are quite stressful things. While there are still a multitude of stresses and strains on my daily existence, I’m not sure I’m in quite such a heightened state as I was during the spring of 2020, hence blogging is once more a hobby rather than a therapeutic necessity.
3. I only had one child. One child can hamper the productivity of even the most committed blogger, and my pandemic-fuelled blogging spree was actually preceded by a similar blogging slump to the one I experienced last year, but, during that hiatus, I always assumed I would get back to blogging at some point. This time around I have been less certain as to whether blogging is a sustainable pastime. Obviously, it is sustainable, there are lot of bloggers who are also parents, but it is definitely harder to find time with two small children than it was with one. Particularly without the benefit of a global health crisis to underpin it all.
4. I did write a lot of haikus. Which does make it easier to churn out daily content, particularly when you ignore most of the rules surrounding what makes a haiku a haiku and instead just rely on counting syllables.

Anyway, I’ve decided that I will still blog and attempt to blog regularly, but that level of regularity will be somewhat less than daily. I think, at this point I’m going for weekly. I may revise this schedule.

One would hope that a schedule that is less reliant on quantity may allow for a little quality to filter through onto these pages, and no-one would be happier than me were that to be the case. But unlike Icarus, I shall not attempt to fly too close to the sun and so my commitment to attempting to blog at least once a week will not be subject to any kind of quality control whatsoever.

For example, producing a post about my blogging ambitions for the coming year was not really my intention when I started writing this. I had fully been intending to write about how uncomfortable my new shoes are, which is much more in line with kind of hard-hitting content you might expect to see on James Proclaims.

But I wrote this instead.

Which isn’t really anything much and probably not the greatest omen for what is to come in future weeks.

I will try and get an update out about the shoes soon though – I imagine a few people are probably keen to know how that situation resolves itself.

In the meantime, if you are feeling a little short-changed by the redundancy of this particular offering, console yourself that it is not a haiku.

I haven’t actually written a haiku for this blog since March 2021.

I am weirdly proud of this fact.

I suppose as I’ve gone all in on what is essentially a prosaic admin update on the inner workings of my blog, I might as well offer a little commentary about comments.

I have, for some time now, taken to closing the comments section of my posts after a period of time has elapsed (this period has ranged from 1 to 7 days depending on my whim at the time). This is mainly as a way of controlling spam – the bots do like to comment on really old posts, often incoherently but occasionally posting links to sites that are…well let’s just say ‘not safe for work’.

However, limiting the amount of time my actual readers have available to comment on posts means that I also have a slightly more realistic chance of getting around to reading and replying to those comments. Which is something I always intend to do but, as it turns out, not something that I do always do. So, apologies if, upon reading this, you find that you really wish to add a thoughtful and/or insightful comment only to discover that you’ve missed the window. Then again, if this post did inspire you to wish to write a thoughtful and/or insightful comment, then it is possible you have slightly overvalued the words you have just read.

As it is the third Monday in January, it is officially and indisputably Blue Monday – the most depressing day of the year.

The rationale for attributing this label to an otherwise unassuming Monday was scientifically proven by a travel company in 2005, who, far from trying to sell more package holidays, were simply trying to raise awareness of this troubling day in the calendar and were altruistically offering package holidays at a reasonable price in order to alleviate the evils of this abhorrent 24 hours.

Amongst the defining criteria for Blue Monday is the fact that the preceding Friday is what is known to some (not me but definitely some) as Quitter’s Day because apparently the second Friday in January is when most of us finally give up on our New Year’s resolutions. Unfortunately I didn’t get that memo, and as I haven’t actually managed to start my New Year’s resolutions yet (reasoning that any attempt to improve my dietary habits would be more successful once all the residual Christmas food and drink has been consumed) I wasn’t able to meet the official deadline for resolution quitting. There is still plenty of beer and chocolate in Proclaims Towers so I’m still several weeks away from being able to commit to a healthier lifestyle if I want to be successful. Clearly I was an idiot for taking such a pragmatic and long-term view, because now I find myself not feeling anything like the requisite amount of depression to really make the most of Blue Monday. Plus I still have loads of chocolate and beer so I couldn’t possibly be depressed today.

Although it is Monday. And, as is true for many people, Monday is the start of my working week. So I’m not a huge fan of Mondays in general. But these days I live with two small children, so weekends are not exactly what they once were in terms of relaxation. They are still better than work but involve a lot more plastic unicorns than once they did.

But this Monday isn’t really any worse than any other Monday.

Probably.

I can’t really be certain how bad this Monday is because, as with most of my posts, I wrote this in the past.

Indeed it is still very much Sunday at the time of writing.

And I’m surrounded by plastic unicorns.

Recently I purchased a new pair of shoes. This is not, in itself, an inherently unusual thing for me to do. I probably do it every 6-7 months. That’s generally how long a pair of shoes lasts in my experience. I buy my shoes for the purposes of work, being more inclined to wear trainers in my free time. I’ve written about trainers on this blog before and the comments for that post were awash with queries from across the Atlantic as to what I meant by the word ‘trainers’. So for the benefit of those readers, ‘trainers’ is British for what you might refer to as ‘sneakers’. But this post is not about trainers or sneakers. It’s about shoes. And I think we’re all on the same page with regards the meaning of shoes. Although if there is any doubt, I’m referring to a more formal style of footwear than the aforementioned trainers. In this case I’m referring to a pair of black leather brogues.

I quite like a brogue, but I’ve been known to wear shoes of varying styles. I’m fairly sure I’ve dallied with a loafer or two (well almost certainly two by definition) in my time. But my latest shoes are brogues. And their predecessors were also brogues. This is not irrelevant. Well the fact that they are brogues is fairly irrelevant but the fact that my latest shoes and the pair they replaced were the same style is pertinent. Particularly as they were/are the same style from the same manufacturer.

Because, the thing about new shoes is that they often require ‘breaking in’. This is not true of all styles of footwear. Indeed whenever I buy a new pair of trainers, they are generally pretty comfortable straight out of the box. Shoes rarely are. I don’t know why this is. Surely in the modern world it must be possible to make shoes that are both smart and comfortable to wear straight out of the box. But I have purchased neither brogue, nor loafer nor, dare I say it, Oxford, without my feet getting ripped to shreds for the first few outings. And yet, time and again, I fail to learn the lesson that new shoes require a transition period. That you shouldn’t really part company with your old shoes until the new shoes are broken in.

But this time was going to be different. I purchased my new shoes prior to Christmas, and thus had the Christmas holiday to break them in before my return to work in January.

So I safely disposed of my old shoes, knowing that time was on my side.

And then promptly forgot all about my new shoes for the entire duration of the festive period.

But all was not lost. Because, as previously mentioned, my new shoes were exactly the same as my old shoes. And my old shoes had not actually required a great deal of breaking in. They were almost (not quite but very nearly) that exact definition of the shoe nirvana I’d spent my life looking for. A pair of shoes that both looked smart and didn’t hurt my feet on day one. As I recall, they had hurt a little bit, but the pain had been fleeting and the shoes had been broken in within a matter of hours.

So I assumed that my new shoes, being identical, would follow the same pattern.

I opened the box and the first warning that all was not well became apparent. My old shoes had been black leather brogues with black laces. My new shoes, though visibly identical in most respects, were black leather brogues with red laces.

Red laces!

I am not the kind of maverick who buys shoes with red laces.

I checked the website from which I had purchased them (and indeed from which I had purchased my previous shoes) and the picture clearly showed a pair of black shoes with black laces. Now this is, admittedly, a website that specialises in heavily discounted goods. I am nothing if not thrifty and while I do like to look smart for work, I see no need to pay full price for my work shoes. Or I didn’t until I realised that lace colour was not a given when buying from discount websites.

There was, alas, no time to rectify the matter.

So I went to work in black shoes with red laces.

And everyone complimented me on my sartorial choice.

The shoes have been a big hit. I can’t move for someone praising my choice of footwear.

Alas, I can rarely move at all.

Because lace colour was not the only difference.

The relative ease in terms of breaking in my previous shoes was not transferred to these ones.

So I was in agony for my first week of wearing my shoes.

And visibly limping.

So alongside regular compliments about my fashionable foot attire, I have also had a lot of concerned people asking after my health.

I, think, on balance, I’d have taken comfort over the accolades.

Nonetheless, I’m not without a small amount of vanity. Lace colour will be a major factor in my next shoe purchase.

And I’ll no doubt forget to break that pair in too.

When the shoe is on the other foot
What happens to the shoe that was originally on the other foot?
Does that move to the foot that the first shoe was on?
And do these feet belong to the same person?
A person who is now wearing their shoes on the wrong feet?
Or have two people swapped a shoe each?
And are now wearing odd shoes?
Or is there only one shoe at play?
And has someone stolen a shoe?
But just a singular shoe?
And are they now hopping away from the scene of the crime?

I appreciate I’m overanalysing a phrase
That applies to a reversal of circumstance
I’m just not sure which, if any, of the above scenarios
Really serves as a suitable illustration
Of a reversal of circumstances

Perhaps if the shoe was on the other foot
I’d have a better understanding
Of the dynamics at play

Yesterday was the coronation of King Charles III. Which you probably already know. It was kind of a big deal. Such a big deal that it inspired me to briefly come out of my blog exile (an exile imposed largely by the fact that I have been in a perpetual state of exhaustion since the arrival of my second child in April 2022).

I don’t really know if this is the beginning of a comeback or a one-off ‘coronation special’. Time will tell.

But I was genuinely inspired by the events of yesterday. Mainly by the sycophantic coverage of an event dripping in pomp and ceremony that, to me as least, seemed at odds with the more general state of the nation, a nation in which many well-qualified hardworking professionals have been driven to strike action on the basis that they can’t currently afford to make ends meet.

Don’t get me wrong, while I’m no ardent royalist, I’m not especially against the royal family (or not all of them anyway) and if we have to have a king, it may as well be Charles. And clearly quite a lot of people enjoyed the day and I wouldn’t want to take that enjoyment away from them. But while watching some of the coverage (because it was quite hard to avoid watching at least some of the coverage in spite of my overall indifference) I couldn’t help but feel that some of the people who were belting out the national anthem in Westminster Abbey, might be more inspired by their own self-interest, rather than a genuine love of the king. So I thought I might rewrite some of the lyrics in honour of that self-interest.

There are five verses to ‘God Save the King’, but it’s generally customary to only sing the first and last verses at official occasions. Which has made my task a little easier. Because it’s much easier to parody two verses than five.

Anyway, without further ceremony (one hopes), here is my updated national anthem for the overprivileged sycophants:

God Save Our Bling!

God save our gravy train
Long live ill-gotten gains
God save our bling!
Our wealth is notorious,
Not meritorious,
We are vainglorious
God save our bling!

The choicest gifts in store,
On us be pleased to pour,
Long may we gain!
May he defend our stash,
And ever give us cash,
To spend with decadence
God save our bling!

The above picture has nothing to do with this post. Other than the fact that I used the word ‘renaissance’ in the title and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are all named after Renaissance artists. I know very little about art but I do know a fair bit about 80s cartoons.

Mrs Proclaims, however, is very much an aesthete.

Which is not necessarily evidenced by the fact that she married me.

She knows very little about 80s cartoons, but has managed to expose me to a few of the great works of art over the years. We used to enjoy a city-break in the early years of our marriage and, having taken in Rome, Amsterdam, Vienna, Madrid, Copenhagen and of course having originally met in Paris, I have been exposed to a fair few of the world’s more renowned art galleries. There are also some art galleries in the UK, believe it or not, and she’s dragged me around quite a few of those too.

We haven’t been to any for a while because, back in August 2018, our first daughter, Little Proclaims, arrived and having children tends to alter how you spend your free time. Various well-documented political, economic and pandemic related issues may also have curtailed art-appreciation opportunities in recent years, but I still feel that parenthood has been the main limiting factor in the Proclaims household.

In April 2022 our second daughter arrived and since then the concept of free time has been extinguished from my world and there have been very few opportunities to explore art galleries and even fewer opportunities to watch 80s cartoons. Although I have reluctantly become an expert in Peppa Pig, Bluey and Cocomelon in that time.

Little Proclaims has featured a fair bit on this blog over the years and, insofar as I have readers, she has proven to be something of a hit. Her younger sister has not featured much at all. Mainly because I haven’t really blogged prolifically since her birth. This cannot entirely be blamed on my youngest daughter. Her addition to my life would best be described by a metaphor involving the dried yellow stems of crops and the vertebrae of a humped animal. If only such a metaphor existed. And is that one hump or two?

In her brief exposure to these pages, I have referred to my younger daughter as Littler Proclaims, which I thought was a clever way of differentiating her from her older sister. On reflection, it isn’t all that clever because, assuming that anyone does still read this blog, I fear that it would be all too easy to get confused between Little Proclaims and Littler Proclaims, were I to write a long missive featuring both of my offspring. And being honest, my life is now so devoid of anything other than my two children that it’s highly likely that both will feature quite heavily should I manage to return to something approximating regular blogging.

But a return to regular blogging is what I am hoping to achieve, as insanely ambitious as that may seem to be. On the off-chance I do succeed in that laudable goal, it may make things a little easier on both of my readers if I now refer to my youngest child as Mini Proclaims. So that is what I shall do.

And so the renaissance of James Proclaims begins.

And it will have very little to do with art or turtles.

It is not Halloween as I write this, but I expect this will be published on Halloween. Ideally Halloween 2023.

As I write this, I am enjoying the sound of the washing machine in the background, having also recently enjoyed the delights of washing up the dishes. I don’t normally enjoy either of these things, but thanks to a recent plumbing crisis, having a functioning washing machine and hot water coming out of the kitchen tap are luxuries not to be scoffed at.

The plumbing crisis was caused by a burst pipe in our neighbourhood a few days ago. The ensuing repair by Thames Water resulted in a lot of silt appearing in our water supply. Which is fairly unpleasant. Despite being a murky brown for much of the first few hours of this crisis, we did maintain a steady supply of cold water to the property but the silt managed to clog up both our combi boiler and our washing machine.

Cursing one utility company, I was forced to rely on another to repair the boiler. Unfortunately, despite waiting in all day for British Gas, when they did arrive it was a five minute visit, during which time the engineer announced he couldn’t repair the problem because he didn’t have the right part. We had to wait another two days for the return of hot water, which does seem like quite a long time to have to wait, particularly as it had taken them two days to tell us this information.

In the meantime silt continued to appear intermittently in our cold water, to the extent that Mrs Proclaims decided to contact Thames Water to see if this was something that was likely to be ongoing. Aside from the fact that it’s not especially nice to drink sandy water, we were also concerned that when British Gas eventually deigned to repair our boiler, it would only get clogged up again if the silt situation was likely to continue.

Thames Water were not inclined to offer a phone number on their website, but did offer a handy online chat facility, on which Mrs Proclaims spent two hours telling someone that she was concerned about silt in the water, and not, as the representative kept interpreting, a ‘split’ in the water. It was not two hours well spent.

Fortunately, as things stand, we appear to have neither silt nor a split in our water and the boiler has been repaired.

The washing machine was also clogged with the aforementioned silt. This turned out to be quite easy to fix, but for some reason, despite knowing that our washing machine fills with cold water, I had assumed that the reason it wasn’t working was linked to our boiler problems. So we went as long without a washing machine as we did without hot water and indeed it was only when the hot water had been restored and it appeared that the washing machine was still not working, that I consulted the oracle that is YouTube looking for a solution, YouTube, as it so often does, delivered a DIY solution that I could manage to follow and now the washing machine is tackling the substantial backlog of laundry.

Hygiene has been rather dubious in the Proclaims household in recent days. I have been showering at the gym, because I am currently on one of my, often short-lived, fitness kicks. Mrs Proclaims, who regards all physical exercise with suspicion, has been suffering cold showers. Our children have largely been disgusting. Mini Proclaims is 18 months old. Even with fully functioning plumbing she is quite spectacularly gross most of the time. Still, the levels she has sunk to in recent days have been impressive. Little Proclaims is now five. She is less inherently disgusting than her sister, but she still has her moments, and is not quite old enough to feel any kind of shame.

Fortunately all has been restored to normality.

So our Halloween might well be less horror-filled than the days which have led up to it.

As I write this, Little Proclaims is in the process of ‘being put to bed’ by Mrs Proclaims. My eldest daughter was never a great sleeper, but has improved over the years, and now, incentivised by her new ‘rewards chart’ is beginning to turn in at a time of day which is quite reasonable. The rewards chart has been specifically designed to help Little Proclaims make positive choices. Because good behaviour can be purchased and I’m not above bribery.

However her younger sister comfortably fills the evening void she has left. Mini Proclaims is far more amenable to bedtime than her older sibling, but the Proclaims girls currently share a room. Mainly because we live in a house which only has two bedrooms.There is the potential to improve our abode via a loft conversion or similar, but finances are less than optimal at the moment due to the fact that I am the only member of my household in gainful employment. This is mainly down to my wife’s endeavours to obtain her PhD. Which she has been doing forever, because she elected to complete her doctoral studies alongside our venture into parenting. Two bouts of maternity leave can really eke out a PhD as it turns out.

Also, someone called Liz Truss claimed she would be a good Prime Minister last year, and it turns out she was overshooting and she broke the economy. So the mortgage is quite expensive at the moment. As is everything else.

So as things stand our daughters have to share a room. Which is mainly fine and something they are both happy about. But sometimes they are a little too happy about it and were we to try and send them to bed at the same time, we might as well remove all the bedroom furniture and install a bouncy castle.

There is, therefore a routine of sorts. Little Proclaims goes down first, and Mini Proclaims gets to enjoy an hour or so of ‘daddy-time’. I say enjoy. That may be overstating things. Little Proclaims has always been a ‘daddy’s girl’. Mini Proclaims is quite open about how much she prefers her mother. She doesn’t dislike me, but she is quite clear that I should not get ideas above my station.

Indeed, the current arrangement of Mrs Proclaims putting the older child to bed, while I occupy myself with the younger one, is specifically designed to convince our children that we’re both competent and they don’t need to have a favourite parent.

Any more that we would have a favourite child.

And I don’t have a favourite child. I love them both.

But as I watch Mini Proclaims filling my shoes with Rice Crispies, it’s hard not to take that a little personally. Little Proclaims has never put any food in my shoes.

I suspect Mini Proclaims is addicted to Rice Crispies. As well as occasionally putting them in my shoes, or decorating the carpet with them, she does seem to genuinely enjoy eating them. Almost at the expense of anything else.

Generally when I, or Mrs Proclaims are in the kitchen, it’s not unusual to discover our youngest daughter, who is still very much below knee height (on me at least, Mrs Proclaims is considerably shorter so perhaps knee height has been achieved there – I’m not sure it matters really but I’m happy to check and update any interested readers) gripping firmly onto a parental leg with one arm and emphatically gesturing with the Rice Crispies box with her other arm. She is a child of few words (unlike her older sister who was fairly quick on the uptake with the spoken word from an early age and hasn’t stopped talking since) but very good at making herself understood in spite of this.

I have no problem with her love of rice-based cereal, and she’s generally quite happy when we eschew the Kellogg’s variety in favour of the supermarket own brand equivalent, so it’s quite a cost effective meal. But she used to be a good eater, insofar as she would eat a fairly broad and balanced diet. Little Proclaims has also always been a fairly good eater in this respect. As parents we are often the subject of envy from other parents, in terms of just how broad a palate our little ones have. I’m not sure I can take too much credit here genetically – as much I am very much the sort of adult who will consume anything and everything, I was, as a small child, quite picky with my food and and my parents were very much akin to the aforementioned envious parents.

As I tend to be the main meal maker in the house, perhaps my daughters’ enjoyment of food stems from my culinary skills. Although I suspect not, as Little Proclaims, while fairly adventurous in her dietary habits, will often describe the meals that I make for Mrs Proclaims and me as ‘disgusting’.

To be fair, she describes a lot of things as ‘disgusting’. It’s one of her favourite words. And, as previously mentioned, she knows a lot of words, so it is possibly of some concern that ‘disgusting’ finds itself in such regular use.

Mini Proclaims knows far fewer words so would never describe any food as disgusting. She prefers to communicate her disgust by throwing the food on the floor. On balance, I do prefer my older daughter’s method of communication in this respect.

We didn’t really do anything for Halloween this year. That’s mainly because we don’t really do anything for Halloween any year. In my head, it’s not that big a thing in the UK. At least it never was when I was a child and my entire world view is generally shaped by how things were in the 80s and the 90s rather than how they are now. In fact my world view is shaped by my rose-tinted recollections of those decades rather than any true understanding of how things really were back then. Which is why I don’t really understand anything about anything for the most part.

As I recall though, Guy Fawkes night was always a thing when I was a kid. Although we didn’t call it Guy Fawkes night. It was generally known as ‘Bonfire Night’, but in some circles it was also known as ‘Fireworks Night’. There may have been a class distinction in terms of which nomenclature one chose. I wouldn’t know which class would associate most with which name though. But whatever name you used, it was always a fairly big thing.

Halloween was less of a thing. I do remember dressing up as a vampire once or twice, but I don’t remember it being something that always happened, whereas November the 5th (or the nearest weekend to it) was pretty much enshrined in the annual list of things to get excited about.

I am notionally aware that Halloween has always been a significant date in other parts of the world and it does appear, if my supermarket is to be believed, to have taken on more significance on these shores of late. Certainly Little Proclaims seemed to be quite excited about it, but in the end was placated by a Halloween-themed head-band picked up in the aforementioned supermarket, for a very reasonable price. She did ask if we might take her ‘trick or treating’, a suggestion which I immediately vetoed, on the basis that harassing my neighbours to encourage obesity in my five-year-old daughter does not seem like a path I wish to follow. Plus the neighbours have generally left us alone on that score since we moved in a decade ago, so I feel it’s only fair to reciprocate.

Little Proclaims was upset at my rejection of her plans, so I found a compromise, which entailed delivering ‘The Tin’ to Mrs Proclaims, who was working on her PhD in what we laughingly refer to as an office and then allowing Little Proclaims to ‘trick or treat’ her mother for her post-dinner dessert. All parties seemed happy with this arrangement, though I imagine this will not be a solution that stands the test of time.

‘The Tin’ is the container in which we keep all the chocolate-based snacks that we occasionally use to bribe Little Proclaims into eating her main meal. On this score it works quite well. However the existence of ‘The Tin’ has proven a little problematic for Little Proclaims’ parents and if we’re brutally honest, most of the time it needs replenishing because of us rather than our offspring.

Anyway, that was it. Halloween was done and dusted. Except that it apparently wasn’t, for Little Proclaims is due to attend her first ever school disco this evening. And it is Halloween-themed. A costume is not obligatory, but on the other hand, if she’s the only one without a costume then what would that say about us as parents? It’s not a question I want an answer to.

As fate would have it, although I work in a school, my half-term holiday is not entirely lined up with Little Proclaims, so although she has been in school all day, I have been off. So Mini Proclaims and I set out on a mission to obtain suitable attire so that Little Proclaims can go to the ball without Mrs Proclaims and I being subject to the judgment of other parents. Because other parents can be quite judgmental. I imagine. Certainly if they’re anything like Mrs Proclaims and I, then they are incredibly judgmental.

Mini Proclaims was not entirely invested in the mission, but she always likes an outing. Even if that outing is to nowhere more interesting than a supermarket. And she’s pretty good company for the most part. She does tend to sing loudly when we’re out in public, but she’s at an age where most people seem to consider it ‘cute’ rather than ‘antisocial’.

As it happens, there were still some Halloween-themed dresses in the store, and now, because the ‘big day’ has passed, they were reduced in price and I picked up what I thought was an absolute bargain of a dress, which has pictures of Minnie Mouse, dressed as a witch and holding a pumpkin. But when I got to the till, it turned out that it was even cheaper than advertised, and I picked up a brand new dress for Little Proclaims for a single, solitary pound.

Given the cost of living crisis, I am now wondering if it is appropriate to use the strategy of only buying ‘holiday-themed’ outfits for my children, immediately after said holiday has passed.

And I’m feeling pretty good about adopting that strategy.

As December rolls around again, thus begins my annual homage to movies, which are not exactly Christmas movies, but which nonetheless have some Christmas(ish) elements. This is my seventh consecutive year of doing this and if it was ever worth doing (which is wasn’t) then any merit ceased to be obvious by the end of year 3. And yet as long as I am able to compile a list of movies with references to Christmas in them, I will no doubt carry on doing this in perpetuity in spite of it, statistically, being the least popular thing I do on my blog. The fact that I have managed to post little else this year makes this annual endeavour even more bizarre, but the reality is that the vast majority of my advent calendars from 2020 (until around 2026) were completed during the increase in spare time afforded me by the pandemic years and so, however productive I may or may not be on these pages the rest of the year round, 24 pointless posts about Christmas(ish) movies will continue to appear on this blog for the foreseeable future. In the unlikely event you are interested in which movies made the cut between 2017 and 2022, the full list can be found by clicking here.

But now we must proceed with Door 1 of the 2023 edition:

Over the years the odd rom-com has made it into my festive countdown, though it is not a category of cinema that I willingly frequent often. However, if I discover one with Christmas(ish) credentials I do feel obliged to watch it in the name of research.

And so it was that I finally got around to watching Sleepless in Seattle, which is a movie I had hitherto avoided given my absolute certainty that I would not enjoy it in the slightest.

As is often the case with the classic rom-coms of the 90s though, I found myself rather liking this 1993 staple of the genre.

Objectively the whole thing is largely nonsensical and in many ways the plot, when summarised, makes more sense as a horror movie or a thriller than a rom-com. Essentially Meg Ryan plays a journalist who abuses her role to relentlessly stalk a bereaved father as played by Tom Hanks. It is definitely credit to the the two leads that a fairly shoddy premise actually ends up being quite a charming 100 or so minutes of cinema.

Score for Christmasishness

Aside from the initial few scenes, almost the entirety of the first third of the movie is set over the Christmas period and visibly so. Indeed, some quite pivotal moments in the exposition of the story take place on Christmas Eve. Ultimately the film concludes on February 14th, which, given the overall theme, might make this more of a Valentine’s Day film, but I think enough of the narrative takes place over Christmas to make this a reasonably Christmas(ish) movie.

2010’s Little Fockers is the third and (to date) final installment in the Meet the Parents series. Like many such movie franchises, Meet the Parents appears to be one of diminishing returns. I quite liked the 2000 original and even if the 2004 sequel was a shameless cash-in predominantly made up of recycled jokes from the first movie, I didn’t hate it.

Like its predecessors, Little Fockers has a great cast.

And that is the only positive thing I can say about it.

I can only assume the assorted star names got paid a lot of money for this abomination.

Score for Christmasishness

I only watched this movie because I thought it was set at Christmas time. But it isn’t. So that’s 115 minutes of my life that I won’t be getting back anytime soon. The very final scene does, however, depict a Christmas gathering, so it just about makes the cut for my festive countdown. But that is scant consolation for having had to sit through such a dreadful film.

Kingsman: The Secret Service is not a movie that is meant to be take too seriously, and is at least partially intended to be a spoof of the spy movie genre. But while it is most definitely tongue-in-cheek, it is actually a pretty good action movie in its own right.

Like so many of the movies it appears to be sending up, Kingsman is best enjoyed if you switch your brain off at the outset. Hardly anything makes sense and the violence is nothing less than gratuitous throughout. But if you enjoy that kind of thing, and I very much do, then it all makes for a pretty entertaining couple of hours.

Score for Christmasishness

As with so many of the films I include in these pointless countdowns, this is not remotely Christmassy for the most part. But there is the slightest hint of Christmas right at the beginning, albeit in a scene when the news of a minor character’s death is being reported to his family. I’ve included movies for more spurious reasons than this, so Kingsman: The Secret Service makes the cut by the narrowest of margins.

2011’s adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo initially seemed to me to be a pointless endeavour. There was already a pretty good 2009 screen-version of the novel, and indeed of the whole of Steig Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy, so this seemed like a redundant attempt at making an English-language version of the movie for people who can’t read subtitles.

But actually David Fincher’s version is pretty good. The purported sequels never got made, but from what I recall of reading the novels and watching the 2009 adaptations, the first one was the best anyway so it’s perhaps serendipitous that the 2011 movie is a stand-alone affair.

The cast are all excellent as befits their collective reputations but, perhaps not surprisingly, it’s Rooney Mara who stands out as the eponymous anti-hero Lisbeth Salander.

Score for Christmasishness

I re-watched this in the belief that Christmas played quite a significant role in the narrative, but it doesn’t. At least not in this version. Perhaps it is more significant in the novel and in the 2009 Swedish-language adaptation, or maybe I just imagined it. Nonetheless Christmas does feature a little bit. The movie opens around the New Year and there are occasionally Christmas decorations in sight and the film rather more explicitly ends at Christmas time, with a Christmas gift symbolically bringing the narrative to a close though not in the cheeriest of ways. Added to that, there is a fair amount of snow throughout the film, which is largely irrelevant, but certainly gives the movie a wintery feel.